There is not much history of the first Eddystone lighthouse, after its completion, handed down, so we may pass quickly to its closing chapter; and a tragic one it is. When altering his building in 1699, Winstanley had laughed at the fears of the inmates who, on many a night during the previous winter, had verily believed their last hour had come. He wished he might be there during the fiercest gale that ever swept the Channel, for his lighthouse was as safe as a castle. This was a bit of bravado. Men of scientific experience had pointed out the defects in the construction of Winstanley’s wonderful work—defects which we have only to look at our illustrations to see for ourselves, and which are almost as apparent after the alterations in the building. But despite all that was said to him, Winstanley persisted that his lighthouse was perfectly secure. We know what happened. How his wish to be in the lighthouse under circumstances that would test its strength to the utmost was gratified, and what was the result. An old man, who was alive in 1780, could perfectly remember the scene at the Barbican steps, Plymouth, when, with every appearance of ‘dirty’ weather, Winstanley persisted in setting off for the lighthouse on the afternoon of November 26, 1703. But the story of the great storm that raged that night and the following day has often been told—too often to bear repetition here. Inland, almost as much as at sea, its fury and its fatal consequences were experienced. Around Winstanley’s house at Littlebury it whirled dead leaves and broken wood against the window panes, and shook the very building itself to and fro, yet but one thing, one ornament, fell to the ground—that was the silver model of the wonderful lighthouse. At what hour this happened we do not know, neither do we know the exact time at which the Eddystone lighthouse, with its inmates, fell into the sea, so we cannot say if there was any agreement between the two; but there were not wanting many folks who lived round about in the Essex farms and villages who firmly believed that the fall of the silver model was Mrs. Winstanley’s warning of the tragedy at Plymouth. The memory of that terrible gale lingered long in the minds of those who experienced it; the papers of the day are filled with accounts of pitiable disasters and of hairbreadth escapes; but no incident made a deeper impression in the mind of the public than the overthrow of Winstanley’s lighthouse—‘going souse into the sea like the Edistone’[6] was a favourite saying long after other incidents in the hurricane had been forgotten.